Why Trump better be mindful of his handling of #MeToo movement.

Could the Rob Porter scandal do lasting damage to the Trump presidency? To follow mainstream media coverage: yes. To follow Trump’s Black Swan candidacy and victory: probably not. One would think disavowing an alleged wife-beater is a low bar to clear. That the president and his chief of staff, John Kelly, have not done so...

Time: 22:10&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Date: 14.02.2018

One would think disavowing an alleged wife-beater is a low bar to clear. That the president and his chief of staff, John Kelly, have not done so — have instead lamented Porter’s departure and praised his service — would, in this moment especially, seem a body blow.

And yet never before have we seen a president to whom nothing, no matter how outrageous or disgusting, sticks. The myriad offenses that were predicted to end Trump have had the reverse effect. They’re so numerous that they’re actually easy to forget (a tautology that likely explains the phenomenon).

A brief history:

Race-baiting. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best ­. . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” (June 16, 2015)
Insisting that Sen. John McCain, captive and tortured for 5 ¹/₂ years as a POW during the Vietnam War, isn’t a war hero. “I like people that weren’t captured, OK?” (July 18, 2015)
Implying presidential debate moderator Megyn Kelly was deranged due to menstruation. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” (Aug. 7, 2015)
Making his penis size a voter issue during a televised presidential debate. “[Marco Rubio] referred to my hands — ‘If they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you, there’s no problem. I guarantee.” (March 3, 2016)
Implying a Muslim gold-star mother didn’t speak at the DNC because her husband and religion forbade it. “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.” (July 30, 2016)
The “grab ’em by the pussy” “Access Hollywood” tape, released one month before the election. “This was locker room talk,” Trump said. (October 2016)
Defending neo-Nazis and the KKK after Charlottesville. “You also had some very fine people on both sides.” (Aug. 15, 2017)
Endorsing alleged pedophile Roy Moore for Senate. “He totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen.” (Nov. 21, 2017)
Taunting Kim Jong-un with nuclear war in juvenile terms via Twitter. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” (Jan. 2, 2018)

These are just a few of the comments predicted to end Trump’s candidacy or mortally wound his presidency — to say nothing of the reports that he doesn’t read, spends hours watching cable news and has had the highest staff turnover in modern political history.

And Trump’s bunker mentality — always deny, always attack — has worked. Against conventional wisdom, it won him the White House. Why would he abandon it now? Five days ago, Trump speechwriter David Sorenson resigned over claims that he physically abused his ex-wife — another departure Trump publicly mourned, all of it a mere blip in our now-supersonic news cycle.

So what to make of the Rob Porter scandal in the #MeToo era? For the short term, it will probably follow a well-established pattern: outrage among his detractors, condemnation throughout much of the mainstream media, op-eds agitating against Trump and his administration, all hoping that this, finally, will be the scandal that sticks — and by next week, we’ll all have moved on to something else, a Tweet or a feud or the latest tell-all book by a Trump refugee.

Look at the numbers: As of April 2017, Emily’s List reported that nearly 12,000 women from all over the country expressed interest in running for everything from their school boards to Congress. The nonpartisan group She Should Run cited a similar number.

The latest polls show Trump losing support among white working-class women, a demographic that helped elect him. In December, the RNC issued a two-page memo warning Trump he was shedding female support after endorsing Moore: from 36 percent to 24 percent of all women, plus a 9 percent drop among Republican women and a 25 percent drop among independent women voters.

Other recent polls show similar headwinds: Monmouth University has Dems up 13 percent among women; Marist has Dems ahead 21 percent, with both finding 6 in 10 women disapproving of Trump. The Atlantic pulled apart a recent Gallup poll and found Trump’s support among women in 13 battleground states, especially the Rust Belt, declining: since the election, he’s lost 18 percent of white working-class women in Ohio and 19 percent in Wisconsin.

Ironically, Trump’s closest advisers are female: Kellyanne Conway. Hope Hicks, who was dating Porter until the scandal broke and considered family. Daughter Ivanka, who forced the issue by showing her father a photo of Porter’s ex-wife Colbie Holderness with a black eye. Trump, one source told Vanity Fair, “was f–king pissed.”

The president would do well to beware: Increasingly, female voters — college-educated, working-class, urban and rural, the ones who helped put him in the White House — are pissed, too.